WAttention Reviews: Philips Avance Collection Noodle Maker

If you love ramen as much as we do, you can appreciate the gastronomic delight that is freshly made ramen noodles. You can probably also appreciate (or not) that terrible midnight ramen craving that’s hard to satiate simply because no ramen store is open at that time. So as avid ramen lovers, it’s no surprise that we just had to get our hands on the Philips Avance Collection Noodle Maker as soon as we heard of it. Make your own ramen noodles fresh in your own kitchen? We were SO on it.

The lovely people at Philips were kind enough to let us use their studio to make our noodles, so we headed down right away!

This self-contained noodle maker comes with everything you need: a user guide, recipe book, two measuring cups, one for flour and one for water; a special cleaning kit and four different shaping discs. It also has a built-in drawer for you to store all the loose parts so you won’t lose anything. Plus, its compact size does not take up too much space on your counter top or in your cupboards.

The shaping discs allow you to create four different types of noodles and pasta – angel hair, spaghetti, penne and fettuccine.

Making fresh ramen noodles and pasta is a simple task and only takes 10 minutes to make two servings (about 250 grams). The chamber has a capacity for 500 grams though, so you could make up to four servings at a time.

As ramen-lovers we got extremely excited about making our own ramen so we got straight to it. All we needed was a measure of water and regular flour which was easy to portion out as the cups are marked for precisely two portions. Something to take not off though, is how much water you use. Using just slightly under the 95ml marker gives you the best results. Dough that’s too wet won’t make good noodles at all.

How to make oodles of noodles!

1. Measure out the amount of flour and liquid you need to make 2 or 4 portions of noodles using the measuring cups.

2. Remove the chamber lid, empty the flour into the chamber and close the lid securely.

3. Switch on the Noodle Maker and use the bounciness control button to set the kneading time to get your preferred noodle texture.

4. Press start/pause button to start churning dough.

5. Slowly pour in your liquid along the entire length of the slot on the left side of the chamber lid.

7. When the Noodle Maker is done, it will push the dough through the shaping disc on the front panel to create noodles. Use the flat cleaning tool cut the noodles into desired length.

QUICK TIP: If you have any leftover dough inside the chamber, hit the extra-extruding button followed by the start/pause button to push the rest of the dough out. If that doesn’t work, try scraping all the dough closer to the front of the chamber before using the extra-extrusion option.

The machine also allows for a simple customisation such as thicker or thinner and softer or chewier noodles. All you have to do is adjust the kneading time for the dough (longer = chewier) and change out the shaping discs — for thinner ramen noodles, use the slimmer angel hair shaping disc and for thicker noodles, use the spaghetti shaping disc.

While we were waiting for our ramen noodles to be made, we had another idea we wanted to try. We thought it would be nice to have a Christmas-themed dish for our upcoming office party so we decided to make green and red penne pasta for our next dish.

Making coloured pasta is almost the same as making regular noodles. You just have to swop out plain water for some fruit or veggie juice. In this case, we used some fresh leafy spinach to get a rich, green coloured juice and vibrant tomatoes for a bright red coloured juice.

If you want different coloured pasta you can also try purple beetroots for a rich purple shade, carrots for a bright orange colour and pumpkin to get yellow.

To get the most of our veggies, we used the Philips Avance Collection Juicer. Like the Noodle Maker, the Juice is simple to use and clean, and compact in size. The feeding tube is XXL size, so it’s easier to get larger pieces of fruit or veggies in at a time which means you can get more juice. It’s not too noisy and makes the most of your veggies and fruits to get the maximum amount of juice with the lest amount of effort.

The Juicer also lets you choose the amount of fiber content you want with your juice (from clear to creamy, depending on your fruit/veggie). For the noodles, we recommend going with clear juice but you can try making them with a bit of fiber.

Basically veggie/fruit in, juice out.

Unlike making long ramen noodles making penne pasta is a tiny bit trickier because you have to have fast hands to cut the pasta to the right length, but stress not, we’ve got a quick tip for you:

Hit pause on the machine when you get the pasta or noodle to your ideal length. This makes it easier to cut rather than trying to fight against the speed of the machine.

Because it takes less than 10 minutes to make two servings of noodles, and measuring everything out is so simple, it was easy to whip up multiple batches of noodles in a short amount of time.

Cleaning the Noodle Machine is pretty simple too, and quick. Simply take everything apart and wash it under the tap. The shaping discs can be a little tricky to clean as dough does get stuck in it. So here’s a tip: Freeze it overnight and then knock out the frozen dough before washing the disc. It’s much easier than trying to poke and scrape the dough out from the machine. But you can also use the slender pin head (that comes with the Noodle Maker) to remove the dough from the narrow holes (especially for the angel hair and penne) if you can’t wait overnight to clean up.

Once our noodles and pasta were done, we simply boiled the noodles, added them to our soup/sauce base and topped them up with yummy ingredients.

Philips Avance Collection Noodle Maker retails for $319 (R.R.P) at most major electronic stores. For more information, visit Philips.com.sg

*Chashu provided by the ever gracious Brothers Ramen.

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